Follow Team HTC-Columbia on Google Maps and Then Let Others Follow You

In case you missed it, check out the Official Google Blog’s post about how Team HTC-Columbia is using Android-powered phones and a special version of the My Tracks app with SRM to share real-time data from the Tour de France. Head over to google.com/mytrackstour to follow along during the race and see riders’ real-time location along with their power, heart rate, cadence and speed right on Google Maps.

Want to record some of this data or share your location on Google Maps during your next big ride? Track your rides, runs, or walks in detail with the My Tracks app on your Android-powered phone. From many popular smartphones, you can share your location with friends using Google Latitude and then publish your location to the web with the Google Public Location Badge.

Posted by Chris Nguyen, Google Mobile Team

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Follow Team HTC-Columbia on Google Maps and Then Let Others Follow You

Google Buzz for mobile now available on more devices

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Google Buzz for mobile now available on more devices

Where Have I Been? Get Your Answer with the Google Location History Dashboard

When I was young, I used to imagine that there was a string attached to me, and that one day I’d be able to see my whole life’s travels laid out on a globe. Thanks to my phone, Google Latitude, and Google Location History, I’ve been able to pull a virtual string behind me for a few months. Alas, I can’t entertain myself for too long with just a piece of string. Today we’re launching an experimental new view in Beta for Google Location History to visualize your location history in a different — and hopefully more interesting — way than just a string of locations.

If you’ve already chosen to enable Location History, the new dashboard view will try to highlight interesting trends from your existing location history, such as trips you’ve taken, places you’ve visited, time spent at home vs. out, and more. Ever wonder how much time you’ve spent at work recently compared to six months ago, or where it was that you stopped on your last road trip? Just check out Location History for some of the answers.

For example, I took a look at my dashboard, and it reminded me that my brother and I watched the Oakland A’s win on the final at-bat on April 17th.

If you’re a road warrior like me, the dashboard can help you remember your trips and where you stopped along the way. Here’s an example of a trip I took to New York to get a little work done and visit some friends just west of Central Park.

Speaking of being a road warrior, sometimes I do wonder how long my string is. I at least know how long it is since I started using Latitude and Location History — about 21,000 miles or 10% of the distance to the moon!

We’re really excited to make Latitude and your location more useful to you, but we definitely understand that your privacy is important. Just as before, Google Location History is entirely opt-in only and your location history is available privately to you and nobody else. Additionally, you may be asked to periodically re-enter your password when opening any Location History page, even if you’re signed in to your Google Account already (just to make sure you’re really you). Of course, you may always delete any or all of your location history in the Manage History tab or disable Location History at any time.

To try out the new dashboard yourself, enable Google Latitude in the background on your phone, turn on Google Location History, and wait a few days (up to a week) to build up enough history for the dashboard to begin showing information. This is just one interesting way you can do more with your location, but we don’t expect it to be the last. With last week’s launch of the Google Latitude API, we hope to soon see people create even more cool ways for you to choose how to use your location and location history.

The Location History dashboard’s information is still experimental and in Beta so you may notice some initial issues with accuracy around its estimates. We’re working on improving the Location History dashboard and Latitude location updating overall, so you’ll notice improvements for both over time. You may also want to try turning on WiFi or GPS on your phone to improve location history accuracy. Visit our Help Center to learn more or tell us your feedback and questions in our Help Forum. Give us suggestions and vote on other people’s on the Mobile Product Ideas page!

Posted by Andrew Kirmse and Kenny Leftin, Software Engineers, Google Mobile Team

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Where Have I Been? Get Your Answer with the Google Location History Dashboard

Tips for exploring the Buzz layer in Google Maps for mobile

We’ve previously given you a few tips on using Google Buzz for mobile, and today we’re focusing on the Buzz layer in Google Maps for mobile. As many of you have found out, location puts a different spin on Google Buzz, adding context to posts and letting anyone find relevant public posts in a natural way — on a map! We wanted to share some tips on a few creative ways we’ve seen you using the Google Buzz layer.

Explore the world around you
Are you curious if there’s anything interesting going on nearby? Enable the Buzz layer in Google Maps, then select any icon from the map or open the list view to see all the posts from the map area you’re viewing. We’ve found patients chatting from different hospital rooms, neighbors discussing a power outage, and even some public flirting. Here are a few more awesome examples we’ve stumbled upon:

• A father hearing his baby’s first heartbeats at the hospital
• Status updates of a rooftop fire being put out in San Francisco
• Shooting of the TV show “Trauma” on location
• Photos of the stadiums being built for the World Cup in South Africa

Ask questions and get answers
If you’re exploring a new area and looking for tips, post a question, and someone browsing Buzz in the area may be able to provide a quick answer. A few weeks ago on President’s Day, I was hanging out in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. Rather than take my chances, I posted a question asking what the parking rules were. A friendly local soon informed me that I’d be free of parking stress — meters were enforced but permit parking was not.

Share a picture worth a thousand words
Even if you could type 100 words a minute from your phone, sometimes a picture tells a different story than words could ever describe. Google Maps for mobile or the Android Buzz widget lets anyone share a picture of their favorite dish or the funny street sign they’ve found. Just attach a photo to your post or take a new one before posting. We’ve found great cases of citizen photo journalism on the public Google Buzz layer, such as traffic accidents blocking roads and location-tagged Picasa Web Albums showing the earthquake recovery in Haiti.

Give tips or learn about places
Google Buzz posts you create in Maps will always include your location (i.e. “My Location”) by default, but you can easily change the approximate location to a specific place, such as a restaurant. For example, change the post’s location and select the restaurant from the suggestions list before posting to give a recommendation or tip. Alternatively, you can search for the restaurant in Maps and select the Google Buzz option from the search results page (the post’s location will automatically be the restaurant). Now, people reading your post will know that your recommendation is about that exact restaurant, and your recommendation will be available for anyone browsing that restaurant’s search results page.

…and one reminder
Because we built Google Buzz in Maps for mobile to let you share information about places with the world, posts from Maps are always public to the web and include a location, either your approximate one or a specific place you choose.

To get started, install the latest version of Google Maps 4.0+ on your Android 1.6+, Windows Mobile, or Symbian S60 phone (BlackBerry coming soon; see availability details) by visiting m.google.com/maps on your phone and going to Layers > Buzz from the Maps main menu. From Android, iPhone, and iPod touch devices, you can also use the buzz.google.com Nearby view and map just like the Maps layer.

Visit our Help Center to learn more or tell us your feedback and questions in our Help Forum. Give us suggestions and vote on other people’s on the Mobile Product Ideas page!

Posted by Chris Nguyen, Product Marketing, Google Mobile Team

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Tips for exploring the Buzz layer in Google Maps for mobile

Introducing Google Buzz for mobile: See buzz around you and tag posts with your location.

Today we announced Google Buzz, a new product that integrates with your Gmail inbox and makes it easy to start rich conversations about the things you find interesting. Google Buzz lets you share web links, photos, videos, and more with those who are important to you. Rather than simply creating a mobile version of Buzz, we decided to take advantage of the unique features of a mobile device - in particular, location. We go through many experiences when we’re on the go, and while there are lots of ways to share these experiences with your friends or even the world, there isn’t always an easy way to let your audience know where you are when you post. Your location brings valuable context to the information you share. For example, does “Delicious dinner!” mean you’re at a great restaurant, or that you had a wonderful home-cooked meal? Your mobile phone, which is with you almost all the time, can help answer these questions.

Google Buzz for mobile allows you to post buzz and keep up with your friends when you’re away from your computer. It also uses your location to identify places around you. You can select one of these places and attach it as location tag to your posts, or read what others have posted about the place.

There are several ways to use Google Buzz on your mobile phone:
* Buzz.google.com: This web app provides access to Buzz from your iPhone or Android phone’s browser, allowing you to view and create buzz messages. It has two different views: ‘Following’ view shows buzz from the people you follow, just like Google Buzz in your Gmail; ‘Nearby’ view shows public buzz that has been tagged with a location near you, and might be from people you don’t follow. From Nearby view, you can also select a specific place from the list of nearby places and view posts attached to that place.

* Buzz on Google Maps for mobile: The new Buzz layer allows you to see buzz near you or anywhere on the map. You can post public buzz directly from the layer, and even attach a photo from your phone. Also, try visiting a mobile Place Page to read recent comments or to post buzz about that place. You can access Place Pages from the web app as well, by tapping on the place name in any location-tagged post.

* Buzz Shortcut from Google.com: You will see the buzz icon in the top right corner of the google.com homepage. Just tap on the icon to trigger the posting box.

* Voice Shortcut: The voice shortcut, which is available in the quick search widget on Android and in Google Mobile App on iPhone, allows you to post buzz without typing anything. Just say ‘post buzz,’ followed by whatever you’d like to post.

When adding location to buzz posts, we focused on places, not just a lat/long location or an address. We wanted to make location information more useful both to your followers and to help others discover information about nearby places. If you don’t want to include your location when you post buzz, it’s easy to exclude your location and post without it. You also control whether your buzz posts will be public or private - by default or for individual posts. While anyone can access your public posts, private posts are viewable only by the people you choose to share them with.

With Buzz for mobile, we hope you can start interesting conversations about places and be more spontaneous when you are out and about. How many times have you missed a fun event, even though it was nearby? Or a better choice of dessert, just because you didn’t know about it? How often have you wondered “Where are you?” when reading a text message from a friend? Now, you can use Buzz to learn that there is going to be a movie night at your favorite park, share with the world that there is an awesome ice cream place right around the corner, or tell your friends about that delicious homemade lasagna.

To start using Buzz for mobile, go to buzz.google.com from your phone’s browser. It is currently available for Android and iPhone, but we’re working to bring it to other platforms. The Buzz layer on Google Maps for mobile is available on Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and iPhone (as web maps). Learn more in our Help Center.

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Introducing Google Buzz for mobile: See buzz around you and tag posts with your location.

Optimized Search Suggestions using your location

Typing a query into the search box on a phone can often be slow and difficult. For this reason, relevant search suggestions that match your intended query can meaningfully reduce the time and effort it takes to submit a search. Today in the US, we are happy to announce an improvement to Google.com search suggestions offered on Android powered devices and iPhone. Now, Google will offer suggestions based on the phone’s current or last location, making the suggestions more relevant.

For example, when users in the Boston metro area begin typing “Muse”, suggestions such as “museum of science boston” and “museum of fine arts boston” are provided because people near Boston frequently look for these very popular museums. On the other hand, users in San Francisco who begin their query with “Muse” will see suggestions for museums in the San Francisco area. By using the device’s current or most recent location, Google is able to offer even better, more useful suggestions than ever before. To try this yourself, go to google.com on your phone’s browser and start typing a query to see the new location-optimized suggestions. Make sure you have turned on “Save recent locations” and “Allow use of device location” under the Settings link on the google.com home page.

Update @ 4:50 PM: Note that you may have to refresh google.com in your phone browser to see the new optimized suggestions.

Posted by Natalia Marmasse and Scott Huffman, Google Mobile Engineering Team

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Optimized Search Suggestions using your location

Keep your starred items in sync with Google Maps

(cross-posted with Google LatLong Blog)

Google Maps for mobile has long allowed you to add stars on a map to mark your favorite places. You may have noticed a few months ago that Google Maps for desktop browsers introduced the ability to star places as well. Unfortunately, there was no way to keep these starred places in sync with Google Maps on your phone. With today’s release of Google Maps for mobile 3.3 on Windows Mobile and Symbian phones, you’ll now be able to keep the starred places on your phone and on your computer completely synchronized. It’s like magic, but magic that you can use. Let me show you how:

My colleague Andy is at his desk right now, and he wants to check out some comedy in London tonight. Google Maps lists the 4th result as Upstairs at the Ritzy — it sounds like a great spot: cheap, fun and comfortable. With one click, Andy stars the item and he’s done. When he walks out of the office and turns on Google Maps on his Nokia phone, Upstairs at the Ritzy will be the top place in his list of Starred Items, and it will show up as a star on his map. From there he can call the theater, get walking directions, or even SMS the address to a friend.

Starring on Google Maps for desktop computers and Google Maps for mobile

Starring places also works great when you’re out on the town and you find cool spots using your phone. I was in Paris with my wife recently. We visited the obvious tourist spots like la tour Eiffel and le Musée du Louvre, but we also found a few interesting places we hadn’t expected. While wandering the streets of Paris, we stumbled upon a cafe…the sort of place you’ll remember forever, but immediately forget the name. I started Google Maps on my Nokia phone, searched for the name of the cafe (Les Philosophes) and starred it, knowing that when I come back to Google Maps on my computer at home, it will be starred, right there, on my map. How cool is it to create a trail of interesting places from your phone?!

For users upgrading from an older version of Google Maps for mobile, you’ll be asked, when you log in, whether you’d like to synchronize your existing starred items with your Google Account. This means you can preserve all the work you’ve put into customizing your map on your mobile, and have it show up, conveniently, in Google Maps in your desktop browser.

To enjoy the benefits of all this mobile synchronization goodness, download Google Maps for mobile for your Symbian or Windows Mobile phone by visiting m.google.com/maps in your mobile browser. And don’t worry, we’re busy building this same functionality into our other mobile versions of Google Maps — so sit tight.

Posted by Flavio Lerda and Andy McEwan, Software Engineers

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Keep your starred items in sync with Google Maps

Nokia India Launched N97 Mini: Smaller Mobile Computer

Nokia, world leader in manufacturing mobile handsets today announced the latest addition to its Nseries range, Nokia N97 mini in India which is a cheaper alternative to the Nokia N97.

The Nokia N97 mini mobile is equipped with QWERTY keyboard and fully customisable homescreen, stylish stainless steel cues, GSM and HSDPA connectivity, Wi-Fi, GPS, stereo Bluetooth, featuring a tilting 3.2″ touch display, 3.5 mm headset jack and a powerful camera for experiencing quality photography and it has 8 GB internal memory for addressing storage needs of customers.

The Nokia N97 mini is a smaller mobile computer that has been designed for the style-conscious consumer.

Nokia N97 mini also comes with Lifecasting with Ovi through which users can publish their location and status updates directly to their Facebook account and other features include a digital compass, TV-out, document viewer, Flash Lite 3, video and photo editor, push email and multimedia player.

“More and more people today want to bring their physical and online worlds together via the internet. The Nokia N97 mini is designed for this new social internet and to help navigate people and places. Moreover, it comes in a pocket-friendly size for those out and about. With live feeds, personalized content, Lifecasting with Ovi, Ovi Mail and Ovi Store, the N97 mini provides web centricity to user in a compact case.” said V Ramnath, Director-Operator Channels, Nokia India.

Nokia N97 mini available in three colours, viz, cheery black, garnet and white. The device will start shipping in the last week of November 2009 at Rs. 30,939 /-

Courtesy: Nokia India

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Nokia India Launched N97 Mini: Smaller Mobile Computer

Google Latitude, now with Location History & Alerts

Since the launch of Google Latitude earlier this year, we’ve been getting a lot of feature requests. One of the most popular ideas was for Latitude to keep track of location history, allowing you (but not your friends) to see where you’ve been at any point in time. Another popular idea was to notify you when you’re near your Latitude friends so you can easily meet up or grab lunch. Today, we’re happy to introduce both Google Location History and Google Location Alerts (beta) to let you do even more with Latitude.

Google Location History
Whether you’re taking a road trip across the country, backpacking across Europe, or just going out for a night on the town, it’s fascinating to look back at where you went, and for how long you stayed. Enable Google Location History to store, view, and manage your past Latitude locations. You can visualize your history on Google Maps and Earth or play back a recent trip in order. Of course, you can always delete selected history or your entire location history at any time. While working on Location History, I found myself going back in time to discover things that would have otherwise been impossible. For example, I stopped at an awesome BBQ place on my way back from Lake Tahoe this summer, but I couldn’t remember the name when my friend was asking about it a few months later. I pulled up my location history for that weekend, found where I was stationary on the drive home, and the restaurant name showed up in Google Maps: Drooling Dog Bar BQ. Check it out below:

Google Location Alerts (beta)
People also want to know when their friends were nearby, but it’s not always convenient to keep checking Latitude to see if a friend has recently shown up near you. After working on this for a while, we realized it wasn’t as straightforward as sending a notification every time Latitude friends were near each other. Imagine that you’re Latitude friends with your roommate or co-workers. It would get pretty annoying to get a text message every single time you walked in the door at home or pulled into work. To avoid this, we decided to make Location Alerts smarter by requiring that you also enable Location History. Using your past location history, Location Alerts can recognize your regular, routine locations and not create alerts when you’re at places like home or work. Alerts will only be sent to you and any nearby friends when you’re either at an unusual place or at a routine place at an unusual time. Keep in mind that it may take up to a week to learn your “unusual” locations and start sending alerts.

To enable these features, go to google.com/latitude/apps. You must first be an existing Google Latitude user; if you’re not already, sign up here. You must explicitly enable each feature, and of course, you can disable it at any time. Learn more in the Help Center about Location Alerts and Location History, suggest and vote on ideas in the Mobile Product Ideas page, or report problems in the Mobile Help Forum.

Posted by Chris Lambert, Software Engineer, Google Mobile

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Google Latitude, now with Location History & Alerts

Search with My Location for iPhone 3.0. And All that Jazz

I recently visited NYC where I met up with my friend Joanne, a jazz singer with a wonderful 1920’s throwback style. I wanted to find a jazz club close to my hotel on the west side for us to meet. The problem was that I hadn’t lived in Manhattan for 5 years, and my memory for places was failing me.

At Google, we want to make searching the world around you as easy and informative as searching the web. That’s why we’re introducing Search with My Location for iPhone 3.0. Now if I want to know which jazz clubs are near me, I don’t have to specify a location - I just search for “jazz clubs”.

As of today, when you visit www.google.com from Safari on your iPhone 3.0, you can choose to turn on My Location by tapping on the link on the homepage. When you tap on the “update” link, your location will be updated and displayed right there on the homepage. Whenever you want to refresh your location, just tap the “update” link. Testing this in New York, my search for “jazz clubs” returned a handful of places within walking distance. I picked one, tapped the phone number, made a reservation, and we were set for the night.

As always, your privacy is one of our top concerns. Google won’t use your location in search unless you explicitly opt in. And you can always disable the feature from Preferences at the bottom of the homepage.

Search with My Location from Safari is available in English in the US and UK. Look for other country and language combinations soon. You can also search with My Location using Google Mobile App, available from the iPhone App Store.

Posted by Joshua Siegel, Product Manager, Google Mobile Team

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Search with My Location for iPhone 3.0. And All that Jazz